Backing-up and restoring Windows Vista

I have had good service for 7 years using Vista on my Dell Desktop and I regularly do disk partition and system back ups using EaseUS Todo onto my external hard driive. Can anyone please advise what I could do if the worst happened and the Dell computer disk failed? Would i be able to restore the external saved files on a later operating system, say Win 7, or would I need to try and get another PC with Vista installed? There does not seem much point in doing back-ups if they are not going to work. Help would be much appreciated.

Staff MemberPremium SupporterMicrosoft MVP

I'm not familiar with Easeus ToDo - from the online description it seems to depend on how you configure it as to whether or not you back up just data, system configuration or make a full copy of your system drive. I use Macrium Reflect which does make a full and complete backup copy of the system drive from which you may run a full system recovery. It also enables you to create a bootable copy on DVD of Macrium reflect to enable recovery in case of complete hard drive failure or you pc becoming unbootable. This only works of course if your images are saved to an external drive. Making a complete copy of a system drive is also only manageable and realistic if all of your user data is stored on some drive or partition other than your system drive. My system drive is only 50GB in size and uses less than 40GB.